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Companies that used to be major household names are facing bankruptcy, pocketbooks are tighter and uncertainty abounds, everywhere. Consumer trust is at an all time low.
According to a recent BBB/Gallup Trust in Business Index survey, trust in businesses has fallen in 13 out of 15 industries, and overall consumer trust in business declined 14 percent in a seven-month period. Certain industries are down as much as 19 percent, and seven of the 15 industries experienced double-digit declines. Edelman’s 2009 Trust Barometer shows trust in U.S. business is at 38 percent - down from 58 percent last year and the lowest in the Barometer’s tracking history. To put it in perspective, Americans’ trust in business now is lower than it was in the wake of Enron and the dot.com bust.
What happened? Consumer trust has to be earned. You have to do what you say you are going to do. You have to act with integrity. You have to BUILD your company’s reputation, and you have to work at keeping it where you want it. It takes work – and time. And, unfortunately, sometimes it only takes seconds to destroy what took years to create. It’s amazing what a couple of bad Tweets can do these days…..
How does your company stack up? Do you know what your customers think about you? What are you doing to change or maintain your reputation? Like they say, it’s all in a name. What does yours mean?
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What if hospital public relations executives tossed out the patient satisfaction form and focus groups? What if they allowed physicians and employees to hear first hand what patients have to say about their experience?
Author Seth Godin gave the example of Medtronic’s smart move to engage employees in the patient experience. Executives, sales professionals, marketers and other employees gather in an auditorium to hear from patients about their likes, dislikes and ideas for improving their products. It is not a sugar coated testimonial or an edited report of a focus group in which only a few people get to witness. But I imagine it is a bare bones, front line, tell-it-honestly session so that people who are developing, manufacturing and marketing the products really watch and listen.
Now, what if hospitals invited patients to tell their story - good to not so good - to employees, physicians, nurses and physical therapists? It is an ideal way for them to participate and understand the patient experience in a manner that is not edited or scripted. What great ideas would staff have after hearing directly from patients about what they expected and what they experienced? What would the C-suite change? What would physicians and employees change? How would this affect the organization as a whole?
Front line patient experience is worth a try.
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I’m too skinny. Not sizewise mind you. But when it comes to carrying my conversation weight at social gatherings, well, I’m the awkward girl in the corner these days.
And I didn’t used to be this way! No no no. I used to be quite chatty. Not long ago (and by not long ago I’m thinking less than a year ago) I was great at dinner parties. I took pride in my ability to be conversant in many topics but particularly in the current events category. Nothing passed by my nose for news and all of the granular details of the day’s stories. Daily I’d consume media like cafeteria buffet - a little Good Morning America to quench my news thirst; onto NPR for good soup before appetizing on a little Ryan Seacrest entertainment news; a main course throughout the day of CNN.com, NYtimes.com, LAtimes.com and anything news.com that kept me full; and I’d finish my day with a little news levity dessert of Letterman or Leno or SNL.
That was before my social calendar became too full to sit down for a news meal. That was before, when a friend or family member would call to alert me to a major news story and say, “turn on CNN.” Suddenly, I was hopping from party to party on Facebook and Twitter and a whole host of social communities. And before long, I became socially awkward in any situation that required me to know more than the headlines of the day (or a topic that was interesting to me, such as “Which Housewife of New Jersey” I most resembled or what vitamins to take for healthier hair). I’ve become self conscious of my news knowledge when talking with colleagues, clients and friends, sure that they are whispering, “Did you hear how little she actually knows about what’s going on in Iran?”
Recent evidence of my poor news diet:
I remember sitting in a class at the University of North Carolina School of Journalism in Chapel Hill pondering the future of news. At the time, we talked about how USA Today was changing America’s appetite for news (or vice versa, America was changing how news was being reported). Later with online news and blogging, the conversation centered on our ability to choose what we wanted to know. And now with social media and microblogging, we are in the know quickly but we don’t stick with the story for long. It’s a fast news diet, it’s not feeding my brain, and it’s not making me popular at parties.
Will we ever again gather around the television for hours as the news unfolds? And if this must be done in our social communities, can we spend a little more time in conversations about these really important stories before moving on to the next status update? This is particularly relevant to communications professionals - how do we truly move beyond conversation starters in social media spaces? And what is the life cycle of a story before the conversation ender sets in or the next headline takes over… for twenty minutes?
I’m back to a nutrient-rich news diet. What about you?
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Miss Destructo of Destructo Deviations discusses the use of social media as a source to deliver news. She uses the death of Michael Jackson as an example stating that she heard the news from Twitter even before credible sources such as CNN verified the news. What are your thoughts?
Rise to the Top’s DJ also uses the death of Michael Jackson to describe the growth of social media. He discusses how social networking sites (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Wikipedia) helped spread the news of Michael’s death. DJ says with the growth of social media, people do not have to wait for traditional media outlets to report news. What sources provide you with breaking news: social media or traditional media?
Meg Roberts asks if young PR professionals are being set up for failure by executing social media campaigns without the proper training. In her guest post on David Mullen’s Communications Catalyst she says, “If companies are going to ask younger PR employees to handle digital communication efforts, they need to ensure these staff members are still learning about other PR tactics and how both sets of tools play a role in a much larger, overall strategy.” Do you agree with Meg?
Social media is often praised as a new form of seeking jobs, especially for recent graduates. Matthew Keegan of Get Degrees provides seven social media warning flags for job seeking grads. His recommendations include using professional email addresses, updating photographs (more professional less spring break!) and cleaning up your social network profiles.
Does your company want reasons why they should use social media? Well David Carleton provides what he believes are the top 20 reasons businesses use social media marketing. The top five reasons are to improve customer and prospect relationships; conduct inexpensive yet effective market research; build brand awareness, authority and credibility; drive traffic to your website; and the ability to obtain insight into targeted niche markets. Read the remaining 15 at Examiner or add to the list!
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When thinking about what to discuss for today’s blog topic, I immediately thought about the media frenzy surrounding the death of legendary pop performer, Michael Jackson. But as my interactive cohort, Wyatt Wood, added to my thought late last week, “Everyone is already talking about how he changed the entertainment world and music videos as we know it.” Okay. So I won’t bore anyone with my childhood memories of watching Mr. Jackson moonwalk across my grandma’s television set on a new channel called MTV.
When I was watching the television coverage on Michael’s death on Thursday evening, my husband automatically thought it was a scam. His immediate reaction was that Michael was so crazy that he staged his own “death” and that he was going to re-appear for his now infamously plotted come-back in a series of concerts overseas. I’ll definitely agree that Michael, in his lifetime, was a magnet for gaining media coverage, even if he didn’t necessarily plan it. But plotting a media frenzy over his own “fake” death? Come on! However, I do wonder how he would have reacted if he knew that his death caused the largest surge in online usage around the world in a single day.
Michael Jackson has changed the internet. I watched a story on CBS Sunday Morning – “Jackson Story Shows Speed of Digital Age” (http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/06/27/eveningnews/main5118920.shtml%20?tag=contentMain;contentBody) and was amazed at all the statistics on social media usage on June 25th. Here’s the quick run down according to CBS:
• TMZ – 1,000 comments within minutes
• Google shut down
• 100 new “friends” on Jackson’s Myspace page every minute
• 65,000 cell phone texts per second (60% more than usual volume)
• 5,000 tweets per second on Twitter
This is the first time that we have ever had a single incident affect the way we communicate across the world. People did not go out and race to pick up a newspaper. They did not call into television stations. We went to our hand held devices and plugged into one medium – that transcended language, religion, and politics. For one moment, we were all online – talking about one thing.
What will this mean for the future? Will YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter melt into one mega-site for all communication purposes? Will the printed newspaper die faster than we expected? Will television only exist on video streaming web sites?
As a web designer – I found the surge fascinating. What disappointed me was that it took the death of a pop-star to show us the potential and power the internet has to offer all of us.
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